"Everything Florentine art from Giotto and throughout the Quattrocento has this amazing quality of absolute truth recognized. The immediate effect of a large Giotto or Masaccio is to let the audience speechless. It s’ once called Beauty. "
MARY MAC CARTHY "The Stones of Florence" 1956.
Contrary to an accepted idea, all new, considered as obvious in our time, the Beautiful is not subjective. No, the Beautiful is not only a matter of personal taste.
The proof that the Beau exists is that it is recognized and unanimously accepted by the public opinion, and that of the specialists, for millions of works whose creation dates range from – 3000 to the present day.
The abstract definitions must be left aside. The Philosophers have never succeeded in giving a satisfactory and incontestable definition of the Beautiful. But there is absolutely no serious discussion about the existence of Beauty, a common sensation shared by millions of people, from Egyptian Art to Modern Art, from China to Europe and America.
The Beautiful can take different forms according to cultures or civilizations. It is recognized as beautiful inside its cultural domain, but also outside.
The painting of the Chinese scholars is very peculiar, it is possible individually not to appreciate it, but it would be false to speak about it an Art of the ugly
The Beautiful is simply a fact verified by the experience of thousands of generations of humans over the entire Earth.
All the quibbles will not change this fact.
What is subjective what are the preferences of individuals. What is subjective is when a person prefers Romanesque frescoes or the art of international Gothic painting of the Italian Renaissance. When a person prefers the art of the landscape or the painting of morals to religious painting.
If someone had told to Fra Angelico, Raphaël or Rubens that beauty does not exist and is purely subjective matter, they would have shrugged.
The assertion that Beauty does not exist, is purely subjective, is a false idea, conceived and spread in the second half of the 20th century for ideological and economic reasons.
The ideological motives are that this relativism makes it possible to justify the ugly art, the academic art , and that the ugly Art is a criterion of distinction between the Enlightened and those who are not.
In addition to the ideological motives, this statement also makes it possible to manufacture and sell the Laid, which is an excellent deal.
This profitable idea widely disseminated in the general public is simply a matter of disinformation. In our time it is possible to spread a false idea in a few hours in the whole world, and to make it pass for a truth of evidence by dint of repeating it. Our elites do not deprive themselves of it.
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